Think Beyond Your Limits

“Don’t Worry, Ma’am — The Waaaambulance Is on Its Way…”

I’ve met a few people who seemed to live their lives looking at Facebook, sometimes to the determent of their real-world situations and relationships. There must be more of these people than I know; during the recent Facebook/Instagram outage, a 911 dispatcher for Concord and Clayton, California got sufficient calls about it that she felt she had to issue a statement:

We have nothing to do with Facebook and when Facebook isn’t working, it’s not an emergency. Our lines our dedicated to handle life and death calls, and even though Facebook is important to a lot of people, it’s not a matter of life and death when it stops working. One caller even called back to tell me I was being rude because I told her it wasn’t a life-threatening emergency.

While there are plenty of stories about 911 misuse, this was a new one to me. As Michael Goard snarked on the ABC 7 Facebook page, “OMG … It was awful … I actually put my phone down and talked to someone face to face … shudder.”